Metaphors and similes are an imaginative galaxy which greater minds than mine have explored. That doesn’t stop me gathering dazzling and original examples to enliven human exchange, expanding the choice of vigorous, beautiful ways to sharpen how we think, read, write and speak.
Street cleaning
A graphic description of a drunkard preparing for his next binge with a water shot. Major Prohaska ordered soda water. Anyone who knew him well could predict that he would get very drunk tonight. He simply used water to clear the way for liquor, the way streets are...
A booming voice
A novel pair of similes to convey a loud, hard voice, including those weighted final syllables.  "Congratulations!" said the father, his voice normal, in the hard German of army Slavs. The consonants boomed like thunderstorms and the final syllables were loaded with...
The effect of someone’s presence
A lovely simile to describe the effect of one person's presence on another. Her presence filled him through and through, like the sweet breeze blown across a hayfield. Source: Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund, trans. by Geoffrey Dunlop (Harmondsworth: Penguin...
As if …
Flying a tiny, fragile aircraft on a reconnaissance sortie, Saint-Exupéry finds the rudder has frozen, and nearly gives himself a heart attack trying to wrench it free. The flight is life-threatening not only due to enemy fire, and reflecting on this leads him to an...
As indispensable as …
A life-line for a Second World War pilot was the rubber tube. Saint-Exupéry's account vividly describes the physicality and encumbrance of flying a reconnaissance plane at the start of the war. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an...
Expert in the next room
Saint-Exupéry, on the aerial front line of a desperate war effort, sums up the difficulties facing the French military leadership; not lack of military knowledge or experience, but of access to the reality on the ground. The General Staff was like a first-rate bridge...
Someday the history of metaphor will be written and we shall at last grasp all the truths and misconceptions in which this intensely speculative subject abounds. Â
Source: Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010, p. 45
Technique as dousing
In discussing the technique of writing, Seamus Heaney conjures a water diviner as a metaphor. At first glance far-fetched, as he follows it through, he builds a close parallel between...
Bright eyes like glass grapes
‘Bright eyes’ implies a warm, sparkling, engaging personality until you slam up against ‘rather like glass grapes’, and then you move into something vacuous and apart. I happen to like...
A hive of healing
A beautiful metaphor of a hive of bees working inside the heart to transmute ancient heartaches to the gold of honey. Surely a device to think of if you are...
The Land of Canaan
Kazantzakis seems to have studied - absorbed - the places of the Bible, bringing individual landscapes and particularities vividly to life. I can't recall a land being likened to air, rendering...
A shire-sized dust-sheet
The tearing of a dust-sheet isn’t an obvious sound to describe the dis-scabbarding of a Greek sword, and then Logue renders it even more striking by adding that singularly English...
Like sunlight on a landscape
You can see an overcast English landscape of rolling hills and fields, and a sudden break in the clouds pierced by a spotlight of sunshine. Â This is a lovely novel,...
As hard as …
I like this simile for an implacable nature, though in this case, let us mention that Poyser is only implacable in the face of bad farming. In many other respects...
Poplars in November
Yes, poplars look like giant feathers poked in the ground, here bedraggled by the onset of winter.
'In November the poplars were like bedraggled gull-feathers stuck in the ground.'
...
Like stale cigar smoke
I liked this image of guilt as a waft of stale and strong-smelling smoke that can't be dispelled with a wave of the hand.
'... but guilt hung about him...
She is as in a field a silken tent
To celebrate World Poetry Day, I have chosen poems which are built on a metaphor. This one by Robert Frost, which I long ago committed to memory, describes a woman...
Of buds and hooves
Who would think to liken the shape of a bud to the hooves of cattle? And that cuckoo singing all night!
'The buds of the ash, sullen for so long in...
As open as …
A limpid simile for being open and transparent. If only more people were like Maggie Tulliver, although it can be said that her openness is not without difficulty for her.
...How many lifetimes does it take to learn the facts of life? Â
(And how long do you have to live to recover from them…?)Â
Is it fact that helps us recover – or is it metaphor? Â
Source: Molly Peacock,The Paper Garden (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 63 – click here for the bestellar review of this glorious book.
The thinker, with his metaphors, will illuminate the external world through intangible ideas that for him are intimate and immediate. Â
Source: Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010, p. 6
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